The Clicking of Cuthbert

read the message in her eyes, not altogether indifferent to his charms,

if you could call them that.

"Golly!" said Mortimer, awed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Their friendship ripened rapidly, as friendships do in the South of

France. In that favoured clime, you find the girl and Nature does the

rest. On the second morning of their acquaintance Mortimer invited her

to walk round the links with him and watch him play. He did it a little

diffidently, for his golf was not of the calibre that would be likely

to extort admiration from a champion. On the other hand, one should

never let slip the opportunity of acquiring wrinkles on the game, and

he thought that Miss Somerset, if she watched one or two of his shots,

might tell him just what he ought to do. And sure enough, the opening

arrived on the fourth hole, where Mortimer, after a drive which

surprised even himself, found his ball in a nasty cuppy lie.

He turned to the girl.

"What ought I to do here?" he asked.

Miss Somerset looked at the ball. She seemed to be weighing the matter

in her mind.

"Give it a good hard knock," she said.

Mortimer knew what she meant. She was advocating a full iron. The only

trouble was that, when he tried anything more ambitious than a

half-swing, except off the tee, he almost invariably topped. However,

he could not fail this wonderful girl, so he swung well back and took a

chance. His enterprise was rewarded. The ball flew out of the

indentation in the turf as cleanly as though John Henry Taylor had been

behind it, and rolled, looking neither to left nor to right, straight

for the pin. A few moments later Mortimer Sturgis had holed out one

under bogey, and it was only the fear that, having known him for so

short a time, she might be startled and refuse him that kept him from

proposing then and there. This exhibition of golfing generalship on her

part had removed his last doubts. He knew that, if he lived for ever,

there could be no other girl in the world for him. With her at his

side, what might he not do? He might get his handicap down to six--to

three--to scratch--to plus something! Good heavens, why, even the

Amateur Championship was not outside the range of possibility. Mortimer

Sturgis shook his putter solemnly in the air, and vowed a silent vow

that he would win this pearl among women.

Now, when a man feels like that, it is impossible to restrain him long.

For a week Mortimer Sturgis's soul sizzled within him: then he could

contain himself no longer. One night, at one of the informal dances at

the hotel, he drew the girl out on to the moonlit terrace.

"Miss Somerset----" he began, stuttering with emotion like an

imperfectly-corked bottle of ginger-beer. "Miss Somerset--may I call

you Mary?"

The girl looked at him with eyes that shone softly in the dim light.

"Mary?" she repeated. "Why, of course, if you like----"

"If I like!" cried Mortimer. "Don't you know that it is my dearest

wish? Don't you know that I would rather be permitted to call you Mary

than do the first hole at Muirfield in two? Oh, Mary, how I have longed

for this moment! I love you! I love you! Ever since I met you I have

known that you were the one girl in this vast world whom I would die to

win! Mary, will you be mine? Shall we go round together? Will you fix

up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the

Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?"

She drooped towards him.

"Mortimer!" she murmured.

He held out his arms, then drew back. His face had grown suddenly

tense, and there were lines of pain about his mouth.

"Wait!" he said, in a strained voice. "Mary, I love you dearly, and

because I love you so dearly I cannot let you trust your sweet life to

me blindly. I have a confession to make, I am not--I have not always

been"--he paused--"a good man," he said, in a low voice.

She started indignantly.

"How can you say that? You are the best, the kindest, the bravest man I

have ever met! Who but a good man would have risked his life to save me

from drowning?"

"Drowning?" Mortimer's voice seemed perplexed. "You? What do you mean?"

"Have you forgotten the time when I fell in the sea last week, and you

jumped in with all your clothes on----"

"Of course, yes," said Mortimer. "I remember now. It was the day I did

the long seventh in five. I got off a good tee-shot straight down the

fairway, took a baffy for my second, and---- But that is not the point.

It is sweet and generous of you to think so highly of what was the

merest commonplace act of ordinary politeness, but I must repeat, that

judged by the standards of your snowy purity, I am not a good man. I do

not come to you clean and spotless as a young girl should expect her

husband to come to her. Once, playing in a foursome, my ball fell in

some long grass. Nobody was near me. We had no caddies, and the others

were on the fairway. God knows----" His voice shook. "God knows I

struggled against the temptation. But I fell. I kicked the ball on to a

little bare mound, from which it was an easy task with a nice